Editor’s Note: San Diego Jewish World is fortunate to have among its contributors the authors of many books. To acquaint you with them, and their literary output, we will from time to time offer articles by the authors telling of their works. This article is by Donald H. Harrison, who is the editor of this publication.
By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO – In the world of running, there are sprinters and long-distance runners. The same holds true in writing. The sprinters are the ones who write news columns and magazine articles. The long-distance runners are those who write books. The many thousands of columns and articles I have written over a journalistic career that began in 1962 as a UCLA student classified me as a sprinter. But in 2004, I had the opportunity to run a long distance.
For many years I had been the editor, and later the co-publisher, of the San Diego Jewish Press-Heritage, a newspaper that had reached back some 90 years when financial considerations forced it to be folded in 2003. I was considerably depressed when that newspaper died, not only because it represented a personal financial loss but also because the Heritage was part of a great institution that had chronicled Jewish life in San Diego since the World War I era.
My wife Nancy knew that over the preceding 14 years, since helping to launch Old Town Trolley Tours of San Diego in 1989, I had been collecting data about San Diego’s first Jewish settler, Louis Rose, and had often spent days at research archives. So she suggested that I write a book about Rose. She knew I desperately needed a project. With her encouragement, I pulled together my notes, gathered some more, and finally wrote the biography Louis Rose: San Diego’s First Jewish Settler and Entrepreneur.
In it, I tried to accomplish two objectives. First, to follow Rose’s life, wherever it might take me, which meant trips to his birthplace in Neuhaus an der Oste, Germany; then to New Orleans, where he lived briefly, and then overland (by car) through Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and the California desert to San Diego. Second, I wanted to tell through his eyes the story of San Diego’s 19th century development as a city. Accordingly, I wrote not only about the personal details of Rose’s life, but also about the unfolding civic enterprises—laying out highways, forming a school board, developing new industries and town sites, and trying to make San Diego the terminus of a transcontinental railroad—all of which Rose was always a part.
After the book came out, I engaged in other history projects—a chapter on the earliest years of Tifereth Israel Synagogue for a book celebrating its centennial; a booklet on the growth of the San Diego Jewish community that had been commissioned by the Jewish Federation of San Diego County (then called the United Jewish Federation); service on the City of San Diego Historical Resources Board; and contributing articles to Western States Jewish History and the Journal of San Diego History. At the same time, I was writing columns for the San Diego Jewish Times, which in its latter years had been a friendly competitor of the Heritage. Subsequently, however, that publication also folded because of financial difficulties.
Eventually, writers from both those newspapers decided to form San Diego Jewish World, and because I had the experience operating a website –www.jewishsightseeing.com —on which I had been posting stories about places around the world of Jewish interest, it was natural for me to expand that site into what we have today: www.sdjewishworld.com. Being the editor of a daily news site is time consuming, yet I was able to complete the writing of another book, privately commissioned, detailing the history of the Wax family of San Diego and the large business they built throughout the western states of America, Waxie Sanitary Supply. Intended mainly for distribution to customers, employees, vendors and family members, the book currently is in the layout and proofreading process.
Now that the Waxie book has been all but completed, I am resuming other projects. I have assembled some information, but need more, about the life and career of the late federal Judge Jacob Weinberger of San Diego. So far I have been trying, without success, to learn about his life as a little boy in modern-day Slovakia, but, to date, my inquiries to that country have gone unanswered. I intend to visit Globe, Arizona, from which he was elected as a young man to the constitutional convention that prepared Arizona for statehood.
In the process of researching the life of Louis Rose, I have also put together voluminous files on other San Diego pioneers, including Judge James Robinson, one of San Diego’s first lawyers, and the Mannasse family who, along with Marcus Schiller, the first president of Congregation Beth Israel, were San Diego merchants.
My second published book, Schlepping Through the American West: There Is a Jewish Story Everywhere, was a collection of articles that I had published in San Diego Jewish World detailing the Jewish “discoveries” my grandson Shor and I made on a road trip up the Interstate 15 to Canada and back to San Diego. The 32 articles told of places in California, Nevada, Utah, Idaho, Montana, Alberta, Washington, and Oregon where we found stories of Jewish interest, ranging from the Mob Museum in Las Vegas to the National Bison Range in Montana to a professor’s office at the University of Lethbridge in Canada.
Now I am collecting Jewish stories along Interstate 8, which is the modern incarnation of the historic route to San Diego from the nation’s southern tier states. Instead of publishing these stories first on San Diego Jewish World, I’m mulling the idea of initially compiling them in a book and later serializing that book on this website.
A daily website, Weinberger, Mannasse, Interstate 8, and a forthcoming trip to Washington D.C. with my grandson all call for some juggling and prioritization, and I can’t think of a better time to inquire of the community whether anyone out there would be interested in joining me in the task of editing and publishing San Diego Jewish World, which I’m proud to say has attracted more than 50 writers as regular contributors. I’m looking for volunteers with journalistic experience and judgment who might enjoy helping to operate this website.
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Harrison is editor and publisher of San Diego Jewish World. You may send a comment to donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com, or post it on this website, per the rules below.
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